Artists

Zuzanna Czebatul

Press release

DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM is pleased to inaugurate its new space in Cologne with a solo exhibition by Zuzanna Czebatul. The exhibition title, In This Economy!?, is a familiar refrain expressing disbelief, uncertainty, aspiration, humor, and persistence. Applied to everyday decisions and extraordinary ambitions alike, it captures hesitation while revealing a persistent determination. For her second solo exhibition with the gallery, Czebatul turns to one of Germany’s most familiar folk traditions: the Lebkuchenherz, or gingerbread heart. Decorated with affectionate messages and traditionally exchanged at fairs and Kirmes, these cookies occupy a peculiar position between souvenir, declaration, and social performance. In My Heart Goes Boom and the series Love Is Always Elsewhere, Czebatul replaces conventional messages of affection with reflections on the emotional and political economies of the present, exploring desire, optimization, consumption, intimacy, and the subtle mechanisms through which contemporary life is governed. A bite mark disrupting the sugar-glazed ornament marks each gingerbread heart as already consumed. Czebatul exposes the increasingly porous boundaries between public opinion and personal identity, and between political messaging and everyday communication. The hearts are installed against Fritzi, a wallpaper of an enlarged crop of an old family photograph depicting Friedrich Merz as a child. Blurred and slightly uncanny at this scale, the image suggests a moment before ambition or the pursuit of power takes hold. The ghostly presence of a child echoes the cookies’ associations with nostalgia, while adding another layer to the exhibition’s exploration of power. Outside the gallery, an inflatable decoy tank, titled Fall for Me, extends the show into public space. Originally developed as a form of military deception intended to mislead enemy surveillance, the object embodies a form of power that operates through appearance rather than material force. Lightweight, collapsible, and mass-produced, the decoy transforms one of the most enduring symbols of military authority into an image sustained by belief alone. Installed at a moment when Germany is debating the return of military service, undertaking its largest rearmament since reunification, and pursuing the ambition to become Europe’s strongest conventional military power, the work reflects on the renewed visibility of militarization in public life. In dialogue with the two series inside the gallery, the inflatable tank shifts the exhibition’s focus from the circulation of political language to the staging of political reality itself. Together, the works examine how power is exercised not only through institutions and violence, but also through symbols, images, and the fictions societies collectively agree to uphold. To paraphrase Marx, one might say that Zuzanna Czebatul, through her sculptures and installations, forces petrified relations to dance by singing to them her own melody. She isolates and rearranges images, forms and words, transposes them into other materials and thus gives voice to cultural layers, whilst at the same time calling into question what is supposedly taken for granted with a dry ‘Is that so?’. The above excerpt is from the exhibition essay Is That So? by Anna-Catharina Gebbers, curator at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, to be published by the gallery on the occasion of the exhibition. Additionally, an edition by Zuzanna Czebatul titled Bitter Sweet will be available on the occasion of the exhibition. The work consists of a real Lebkuchenherz—a gingerbread heart—created by Czebatul, with the phrase “Love Is Always Elsewhere” rendered in sugar icing. Bitter Sweet is part of our ongoing HUNDERT series, offering artist editions of 100 for 100 EUR.